It really takes no culinary experience to discern what the following ingredients are a recipe for:
-24 Machines
-26 attendees
-24 Missing Power Cords
-1 Faulty Projector
-26 Missing Booklets
-2 Tons of Stress (1 per presenter)
It certainly sounds like a perfect recipe for disaster. The first day at Paris has been the most stressful – no doubt about it. It would seem that with the aforementioned ingredients, we would be destined to fail miserably, but thanks to very hard work and support from a lot of people, we managed to find solutions for every one of the problems we faced in the time required. .
Au contraire to most events, we had a Microsoft speaker who has been involved with
Route64 for some time –
Christophe Lauer. Mark from HP and Laurent from Intel (who kindly helped us with power cable issues) followed with their respective keynotes that presented the HP offers and information on Intel’s commitment to their customers who are porting to 64-bit.
The C++ was of particular interest to the presenters. Even
Gilles Vollant (Microsoft C++ MVP) mentioned that had learned quite a bit, specifically in the alignment/padding section. Many people were interested with VAS and had a plethora of questions which were correctly addressed.
It seems as in every event there is something unique - in the case of Paris, it was the fact that the hotel almost burned down - and no, our machines were not the ones responsible :) The fire alarm went off during the last day at 3:00 p.m; it seems a room on the third floor was on fire. Firemen came over to the Marriot at Champs Elysee and managed to put the situation under control. Make sure you check out the Paris gallery to see the pics of the firetruck in front of the Marriot, quite an unusual site!